My name is Rebecca. I am from Marietta, Georgia and went to college at The University of Alabama. At this point I started my journey 3 1/2 years and over time it has turned easiest to have a timeline of events to explain my story.
- November 4th, 2008 the day that will live in infamy Barak Obama was elected president and I started coughing up blood early in the afternoon. I went to the urgent care in Tuscaloosa that I always went to and they sent me to a pulmonologist at DCH and he admitted me immediately to the hospital
- November 5th, the first bronchoscopy occurred which got a false positive for a bacterial infection.
- November 6th, first intrusive biopsy which gave me my 1 inch scar across mythroat and all that was found were lymph nodes that really weren'tfunctioning(the issue on why it took a year and a half for the diagnosis)
- Spring 2009 After 3 months of antibiotics for the mis-diagnosis from the bronch failed to work I started going to UAB where I had multiple tests and procedures
- Late April 2009 after a bronch and biopsy granulomas were found(which are the tell tell for sarcoidosis, but also they can appear in lymphoma)
- I went on a 6 month wait and see with the sarcoid and in December 10, 2009 I started a medium dose treatment of prednisone.
- March 2010 was the 3 month prednisone check-up. My Dr. after looking at everything decided that I needed to stop the pred and we needed a biopsy of the nodes on the neck, but I had to be off the pred just to see if coming off the meds would have the nodes go down or not
- May 17th I graduated from Alabama 9 days prior and Dr. C at UAB removed two lymph nodes both being about 1 inch in size. The first and larger one was reactive, the second had plenty of live tissue and we were able to get a positive diagnosis of something and that something was Hodgkins Lymphoma.
- Upon staging it is stage 4 NS all in my torso and going after my spleen and lungs
- June 17th I started an ABVD treatment-November 8th
- October 5th PET Scan shows cancer free!
- December 6th PET scan showed some lymph nodes on my left side
- February 10th VATS procedure
- February 18th The Hodgkin's is back
- April 1st Egg Harvesting
- April 4th Start ICE chemo
- May 16th Stem Cell Harvest
- June 22nd Start chemo for Stem Cell Transplant
- July 1st Stem Cell Transplant
- August 18th Start Radiation
- September 12th Finished Radiation
- November 14th VATS #2
- November 28th Cancer is officially back
- December 8th Began Gemcitabine/Navelbine chemo through February 2nd
- March 1st Start SGN-35
